Before the coronavirus upended higher education, graduate-student activists at the University of California at Santa Cruz were waging an unrelenting wildcat grading strike against the administration. They wanted a cost-of-living adjustment of $1,400 a month to account for living in an extremely expensive city like Santa Cruz. Protesters blocked the campus’s two main entrances, causing classes to be canceled, and car horns blared constantly from passing motorists who supported their demands. Many protesters were fired, and the demonstrations spread to other University of California campuses, attracting national attention.
Now, of course, students face a very different obstacle to attending classes. As the Covid-19 pandemic took hold and states issued stay-at-home orders, the teaching assistants found themselves without physical gathering spots where they could support one another through a difficult time. The momentum of the strike — and the issues at stake — had shifted. As of this week, almost all of the 80 or so Santa Cruz graduate students who had been withholding grades decided to submit them. As the monthslong grading strike effectively ended, students began trying to negotiate their jobs back.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
The calculus of activism and agitation for change has shifted, not only in Santa Cruz but across academe. Graduate students nationwide are finding their positions more precarious as their institutions face financial deficits in the millions, as the job market dries up and hiring is frozen, and as they face their own financial and personal burdens brought on by the pandemic.
At the same time, the work of labor activism has become more challenging. Graduate students’ traditional forms of protest are hampered by social-distancing protocols and empty campuses — picket lines aren’t easily replicated on Zoom — and they worry that alternative methods they’ve devised make them vulnerable to retaliation. All the while, the universities they’re pressuring for support are operating on bootstrapped budgets. But one expert looking at historic precedent thinks they may come out ahead.
A Different Form of Protest
Nathan Xavier Osorio, a first-generation grad student in literature at Santa Cruz with about $125,000 in student-loan debt, had been among the 80 or so teaching assistants withholding grades in early March. At the end of the month, as the pandemic surged, he was formally fired.
“Instead of meeting with us to bargain in good faith, the university dealt punitive measures that further shunt us into precarity while a public-health emergency surges and the economy shuts down,” he said. “I was lucky enough to be able to secure another job as a graduate researcher with a sympathetic center on campus, but many of my peers have had to go on unemployment in order to keep food on the table, not to mention paying their high rent.”
University leaders have consistently argued that in not negotiating with the unauthorized strikers they were, in fact, respecting the collective-bargaining process. “It is extremely disappointing to us that we have to take this action,” wrote Scott Hernandez-Jason, a university spokesman, in an email last week, “but we ultimately cannot retain graduate students as employees who will not fulfill their responsibilities as teaching assistants or graduate-student instructors.”
But the activism, organizers say, isn’t over; it’s just taking a different form. Activists across the UC system started Strike University, a collection of online classes and teach-ins with titles like “Organize Your Department” and “The Precariat and Popular Power.”
A similar effort is underway at Columbia University, where a group of graduate students began a labor and rent strike on April 17. Among their demands are that the university increase their summer stipends to $6,000, extend funding and employment eligibility and time-to-degree requirements for one year, and cancel rent for university housing.
Organizers told The Chronicle on Wednesday that nearly 300 graduate students had joined the action, and a website set up for the strike linked to several letters of support from faculty members. Meanwhile, organizers have set up a roster of teach-ins on Zoom, including one session led by UC strikers.
At Columbia, the strike comes amid a long history of fractious relationships between the union and the university. Members of the Graduate Student Union, which is represented by the United Auto Workers, held a weeklong strike in 2018, two years after Columbia activists helped overturn a National Labor Relations Board decision forbidding private-college unions to engage in collective bargaining.
While the university and the union have been “actively negotiating” for more than a year, a Columbia representative said, the current action exists outside of union boundaries. “The demands from these students concern hardships related to the pandemic and are outside the scope of official bargaining discussions,” the representative wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “Columbia is supporting its graduate students in a variety of ways during this crisis, including a $3,000 enhanced stipend for qualifying Ph.D. candidates.”
Danielle Carr, a doctoral student in anthropology at Columbia and an organizer, said that those measures weren’t enough, and that her cohort’s activism reflected a larger issue.
“The impetus for organizing right now with this degree of passion is that we have seen the future, and it looks like the long precaritization and the neoliberalization of the university from the past,” Carr said, “but a hell of a lot worse because” it’s “refracted through the shock-doctrine moment that we’re in, when the university can push through things that it’s been trying to do for a very long time.”
Carr’s fellow organizer, David E. Silverberg, a Ph.D. student in Columbia’s religion department, concurred. “This isn’t just about what’s happening during Covid,” Silverberg said. “It’s also about what will continue to happen for the next several years, unless there is something done immediately to show that we’re not going to just accept austerity measures that drastically reduce the quality of life of us, faculty, and our students.”
But the challenges of striking in an online environment are many. Teaching strikes often rely on visibility, and with classes taking place virtually — and, in many cases, asynchronously — it can be difficult to discern whether or not they’re actually happening. Strikers posted on Twitter an email from a Columbia administrator raising that very question.
“We understand that you may not have met the students in your course as scheduled yesterday, Monday, April 27,” the email, from Carmen DeLeon, assistant provost for academic appointments, read. “Please let us know if you did, in fact, meet with the class, or, if you did not, the reason for your absence. You should know that you will not be paid if you missed the class because you were on strike.”
While shuttered campuses and the move online can get in the way of strikers’ visibility, some of them think their inscrutability works to their advantage. “Columbia’s inability to guarantee to its students that the university is even functioning is … one of the reasons that we are striking,” Silverberg wrote in an email to The Chronicle.
The Columbia and Santa Cruz protesters aren’t alone in their efforts. At Villanova University, graduate students in the philosophy and theology departments are making their own demands, which include an additional health-care stipend and continuous summer pay, and circulating a statement of solidarity. Social-sciences and humanities students at Princeton University are asking their administrators for time-to-degree extensions and emergency funding. And at the University of Miami, a group of graduate students wrote a petition asking for more funding and for university executives to take pay cuts.
Continued Surge in Activism Is Likely
It’s difficult to tell whether efforts like the ones at Columbia, Princeton, and Villanova mark a rise in graduate-student activism, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City University of New York’s Hunter College. But if history offers any indication, Herbert said, a surge in activism is likely.
It’s true that the 2008 economic crash predicated “an attack on unionization,” said Herbert, including the revocation of collective-bargaining rights for faculty members at the University of Wisconsin. But the closer comparison with the current crisis, Herbert said, is the Great Depression, which saw a “huge spike” in labor activism of all stripes, including the first widespread instances of student activism. The trend before the pandemic was also “a tremendous amount of organizing” among graduate students, Herbert added, including mass unionization efforts between 2013 and 2019.
Herbert noted that the federal Cares Act requires that any nonprofit organization that receives a loan remain neutral during any sort of union drive, which would give graduate-student organizers a major advantage, but the NLRB is also considering a rule that would prevent graduate students at private colleges from unionizing.
In the meantime, Herbert said, activists will have to get creative to do their work from inside their homes. The UC students’ Strike University is one example of that innovation, but it doesn’t come without risks, Herbert warned. For example, if protesting students use their university-issued computers to organize, they open themselves up to possible surveillance by the institution. Recorded demonstrations, including teach-ins, could be weaponized and manipulated.
Despite the risks, Herbert sees possibilities. “Everyone is learning as we go along,” Herbert said, “so it wouldn’t surprise me that creative people will be creative and will come up with other ways of using technology in a positive way.”
In fact, Covid-19 could usher in a new era for graduate-student activism. While he’s leery of making sweeping predictions as our understanding of the pandemic and its effects shifts by the day, Herbert envisions “a major paradigm shift in American history toward a much greater understanding of the common good and that the common good may become a central component of all forms of collective bargaining and treatment toward each other.
“That’s a hope. That’s not a guarantee,” Herbert said. “But I think that there’s definitely that possibility.”
